Robert Daniels’s review published on Letterboxd:
America still hasn’t recovered from the Great Recession, another collapse which reproved our country’s financial inequities. Fern (Frances McDormand) is one of those who remains affected by the crisis. She’s a seasonal Amazon factory worker living in a barren, little-known corner of America. Widowed and taking shelter in her van, the country she’s occupying has changed: When once the mining of local minerals fueled the populace, now Amazon’s shipping boxes keeps the economic peace. For instance, upon the gypsum plant’s shuttering, due to the demand for sheetrock declining, her town of Empire, Nevada was literally wiped off the map. Now the industrial heritage of the area only survives in the past. Among many others, she feels forgotten, left behind by an economy with little room for her. Driven to the margins, still searches for what once was.
Based on Jessica Bruder’s novel Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland — the follow-up to her stirring sophomore effort The Rider — is a transcendentalist odyssey about forgotten people learning to live again. [full review available, here]